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Communist medicine
Published in Vivienne Lo, Michael Stanley-Baker, Dolly Yang, Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022
Second, influenced by the Chinese Herbal Medicine Campaign and Western pharmaceuticals, Chinese patent medicine developed rapidly during the 1970s. To overcome the inconvenience of decoction of Chinese materia medica, raw herbal medicines became much more commonly made up into pills, liquids, syrups, and powders than before, and new forms such as granules, instant teas and capsules also came into use. Chinese medicinal products have been further standardised in terms of these extraction and production processes, packaging, dosages, and ingredients.
Principles of Integrated Medicine
Published in W. John Diamond, The Clinical Practice of Complementary, Alternative, and Western Medicine, 2017
Patients are ethically obliged to inform their traditional practitioners what CAM modalities they are using and what supplements and herbs they are taking. Many of the herbs and herbal mixtures interact with regular drugs and some herbs are absolutely contraindicated in some diseases. Informing one’s doctor is important from two perspectives: (1) he or she needs to know what one’s being taken as a therapeutic alternative which may augment, supplement, or even antagonize the drugs he or she is prescribing, and (2) the doctor needs to know that at some level the patient has lost partial faith in regular medicine and is now open to possibly unproved and inappropriate therapies, for which the doctor, if he or she is still treating the patient, will ultimately be held responsible for the clinical outcome. Playing games with one’s practitioner and being less than honest is no way to establish a good healing rapport. A particularly CAM-adherent patient came to see me with complaints of palpitations and syncope of two days duration. On examination she had a pulse rate of 180 beats per minute and a blood pressure of 160/100 mm Hg. She had never had any cardiac pathology and her historic blood pressure was 110/70. On questioning she admitted to taking a Chinese patent medicine for a viral prodrome that she felt was coming on. I inquired into the name of the medicine and asked her what dosage she was employing. The patent medicine was Yin Chiao (Lonicera-Forsythia Dispel Heat Tablets), which is commonly used for viral infections in the first 48 hours of symptoms. The normal dose is 5 to 6 pills every 2 to 3 hours for the first day, then decreasing to every 4 to 5 hours the next day. She had been taking 8 pills every 2 hours for two days. In spite of the increased dosage, her symptoms did not make any sense, as the action of the formula does not cause palpitations and raised blood pressure, even in an increased dosage. Inspection of the bottle revealed the cause of her symptoms. Many of the newer Chinese patent formulas, as a reflection of the renewed interest of the Chinese in Western culture and medicine, include Western pharmaceuticals. Some of the formulas for arthritis will, for example, include some cortisone, and in this case the medication included rather large amounts of paracetamol, caffeine, and chlorpheniramine. She was virtually on a therapeutic dose of “speed” due to the Western pharmaceuticals included in her Yin Chiao. All her symptoms disappeared within 8 hours of stopping the patent formula.
The treatment of menopausal symptoms by traditional Chinese medicine in Asian countries
Published in Climacteric, 2021
Commonly used Chinese patent medicines include Kuntai capsule, Zhibai Dihuang pills, Kunbao pills, Modified XiaoYao pills, and LiuWei DiHuang pills (Table 1). Chinese patent medicine is made from CHM and processed into products with various dosages and formulations, including pills (Wan), San, and ointments, which are produced by pharmaceutical companies. The formula of the Kuntai capsule is derived from the ‘Huanglian Erjiao Decoction’ contained in ‘The Treatise on Febrile Diseases’, written by Zhang Zhongjing during the Eastern Han Dynasty. It is made from six herbs: Radix Rehmanniae, Coptischinensis, Radix Paeoniae Alba, Ejiao, Radix Scutellariae, and Poria. Recently, some randomized controlled trials using the Kuntai capsule were published. Sun et al.’s study, published in 2016, recruited 390 women with perimenopausal syndromes from four clinic centers. The inclusion criteria included age 40–60 years, estradiol below 30 ng/L, and follicle stimulating hormone above 40 IU/L. The patients were randomly assigned to the Kuntai capsule group or the group receiving menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) by the random-number table method during 12 months of treatment. Patients were interviewed quarterly; scores for the Kupperman Menopausal Index (KMI), hot flushes, insomnia, and Menopause-Specific Quality of Life (MENQOL) and adverse effects were used for evaluating drug efficacy. After treatment, hot flush and insomnia scores both improved significantly in the two groups (p < 0.01); and the MHT group had better performance than the Kuntai capsule group in improving hot flushes (p < 0.05). The MENQOL score was significantly improved in both groups after treatment (p < 0.01), but there was no significant difference between the two groups (p > 0.05)9.
Clinical practice of traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis: a literature review
Published in Climacteric, 2022
J. Li, S.-F. Fu, Y. Yang, R. An, H.-Y. Liu, H.-P. Mao
Chinese patent medicine is the essence of effective prescriptions created and summarized by Chinese medical scientists over thousands of years of medical practice. There were 18.0% (76/423) of included studies that took 37 kinds of Chinese patent medicines for participants in the treatment group. The most frequently used Chinese patent medicines, reported more than ten times, are presented in Table 2. The top one was Gushukang capsule, commonly used to treat back pain, waist and knee weakness.